Cornbury Park Game and Country Fair, Charlbury

Decided to only go for the day as both our teams were running Sunday and the weather wasn't exactly looking promising. If I'm being honest I was dreading it Saturday night as it was tipping it down with rain and I always worry about running Asher if the ground is going to be slippery. When I arrived at the venue Sunday morning it was grey and miserable but it had stopped raining. They put off racing until 10am to give the ground some time to drain.

Rockets were up 1st in Division 2, we were a bit short on dogs this weekend so we had old girly Jive up with us as our start dog and then the usuals Perry, Smartie and Jamie. Jive did really well considering Louise insisted on getting like a gazillion false starts, it wasn't entirely Lou's fault as she is now running Jive from around 25ft so that she doesn't hit the box so hard and can get a better turn as she finds accelerating back off the box a little harder now (she'll be 11 in Sept), this worked really well and I found her really consistent to change to with Perry. Perry was an angel as always, I feel sorry for his owner Bobbie who doesn't get to race him at the moment due to running Jamie! We were top seed but weren't sure how we'd do as we expected to be considerably slower with no Bonnie, Lacy or Sonny on this team but we were really pleased to just lose one race and finish 2nd with a best time of 20.09secs.

Ballistics were 2nd seed in Div 1, we were quite hopeful for a good placing as there was around half a second difference in seeding between us and the next seed. We didn't have Diefer this weekend so the team was Sonny, Rosie, Asher and Bunty. The 1st race was a total disaster, we got 3 lights in 3 legs and that was that! The 2nd race was alot better, we got our act together and managed a best time of 18.14secs, the next race we managed 18.16secs and we won both of those. We were really pleased with those times as we would expect to be slightly slower without Diefer and we had a little bit of room on our changeovers. I must say though, I felt Asher was on fire, he looked amazing and he had some awesome boxes. I think he even shocked himself with some of them as he was over rotating slightly, certainly no chance of him going wide that day lol! We have discovered that we must anchor the box down at the sides aswell as Asher hits it so high he lifts it up which puts him off balance, with it firmly anchored he seemed to have more confidence in putting his 4 feet up higher which I hope will continue to improve and become more consistent. This also helped Jive and Sonny. Sonny was fumbling alot less, he is gradually getting better. We've had problems with the fact that his box has got so much better that he has less time to catch the ball so he has been mis-timing it quite regularly and fumbling. With the box anchored I suppose the box fire was more consistent and easier to judge, makes perfect sense now but only when you think about these things! Anyway in the afternoon we managed to lose another race on lights, won the next one. Then had the Bandits as the last race, we finally managed to put in 3 perfect runs but they were just that little bit quicker. So we finished with won 3, lost 3 and somehow ended up 5th! A bit disappointing but I'm sure were just saving up all our good luck for the Champs!

Had a couple of lovely comments on how fantastic Asher is, makes me smile, god I love my dog :-)! And the weather was mostly lovely, hot and sunny!